Thursday, February 19, 2009

Fish Scales / Polaroid Sea

They give us all a hundred million polaroid cameras. One camera for each person. Each each time you feel something you take a picture. Feel something new. Distressed. Loved. Begrudged. Feel that, take a picture. Don't think about it. Capture yourself.

Drop that picture. On the ground. Don't ever look at it again. You have felt that. It was recorded and abandoned. Right there. Keep walking. Feel something new. As you walk, pick up the pictures of the strangers who have felt things around you. Do not seek pictures you know. Do not recognize these images. Pick them up. Keep them.

Look at these polaroids. With your coffee. On your dashboard. Know them. Feel from them. There is an old man. There are many empty hallways. Too many books and laundry baskets. There is someone laughing in their underwear. Keep these pictures on your person. They make you feel something. It is not the feeling the person felt when they took it. This is irrelevant.

When you feel something you have known, an echo, from a picture, that you keep, stop walking. Pause. Remove that polaroid. Put it up, right there. However you can. Where you felt it. Let it go. You have felt that. You recognized and marked it. Keep walking. Feel something new.

These pictures cluster together. You feel where others have also felt. There is a sadness in one stairwell. A door opens to mixed emotions. You pin your echoed feelings up. Those echoes ripple. Under a table you find pictures of secrets. Over a bed you find pictures of tears and friends.

The polaroids talk to one another. They socialize. They breed. Their language is silent but thick. You feel it. You see a picture. You feel an echo. You put another picture up. You take another polaroid. The images guide you as you walk. You cling to them. You avoid them. You keep walking.

The wind rips scales off of the rainbow fish walls. The polaroids flee. A stranger finds them, miles away. You pass the wall. There is new room for a feeling. You reach into your bag for another polaroid. You heal the sea of echoes.

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In Explanation

"...And the pain, intolerable. Until one night, she [the princess who could not speak] went to the garden, and dug with her hands in the ground a small hole, and bending to the earth, screamed with all her heart. Screamed and screamed her pain into the hole until morning. And it was better."

This collection serves as a receptacle for overflow. These words, lacking a place of their own, flow here. It is my hope might that they might flourish here in the dark.